Dina Kraft: The Legacy of Anne Frank’s Best Friend

Anne Frank's best friend survived to tell the story Anne could not. Journalist Dina Kraft and Hannah Pick-Goslar’s daughter, Ruthie Meir, reflect on friendship, survival, and the weight of carrying memory forward in this episode of TO BE CONTINUED...   They discuss what was lost, and what was rebuilt through resilience, testimony, and hope across generations.   TRANSCRIPT: This episode of TO BE CONTINUED… is sponsored by Vicki Robinson and Michael Robinson in honor of Morton Kess, who helped liberate the concentration camps in Germany, and in memory of all those who died at the hands of the Nazis, and by Carl Fremont and Joanne Fremont Burns in loving memory and in honor of their parents. Ted Fremont, born official Fischel Friedman, who was a Holocaust survivor from Vilna, Poland. Ted lost his mother and seven siblings. He married Helen Garfield from the Bronx, and together they built a welcoming and loving home. Both Ted and Helen were beacons of hope and inspiration.   Today's conversation is about friendship, survival, and what it means to carry memory forward, not as history alone, but as life. When we think of Anne Frank, we often think of her diary, her hiding, her tragic death. But Anne Frank was also a girl with friends… friends who loved her and who laughed with her, and who survived her. One of those friends was Hannah Pick Goslar. Hannah survived Bergen-Belsen, where she and Anne had a final heartbreaking encounter through a fence. Hannah lived. Anne did not.   And that single fact shaped Hannah's life and the lives of her children and grandchildren, to be continued for generations.   Welcome to this podcast, TO BE CONTINUED…Reflections on Growing Up with Holocaust Survivors, where we explore the intersections of memory, identity, and resilience. Our goal is to lift up the experiences of children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, and to ask, How did those memories form you? How did resilience create you as the person you are today? And what is the legacy that you will leave to those who come after you?   I'm your host, Rabbi Jeff Salkin. Today we're joined by Dina Kraft, a journalist and veteran correspondent who has written for the Christian Science Monitor, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the JTA, among others. Dina is the co-author of My Friend Anne Frank, who writes not only as a storyteller, but as a third-generation descendant of a Holocaust survivor.   We also welcome Ruthie Meir, Hannah Pick Goslar's daughter, a second-generation descendant who grew up in the shadow and the strength of her mother's experience. Ruthie was her mother's right-hand assistant before and during the writing of the Anne Frank book. All of them live in Israel. And that matters. Because this is not only a story about what was lost, but about what was rebuilt. It's about how trauma travels through generations, yes, but also how resilience makes that same journey. How survivor's guilt lives alongside gratitude. How memory gives birth to responsibility. And how Jewish life continues publicly and unapologetically after catastrophe.   This is a conversation about intergenerational trauma, but it's also about intergenerational strength. It's about the burden of telling the story, and it's also about the moral courage that we need to carry that story forward with honesty, compassion, and humanity.   Welcome, friends. It's great to have you on To Be Continued.   Ruthie, your mother, Hannah Pick Goslar, wrote in her book, My Friend Anne Frank, that “Anne Frank had become a symbol in many ways of all the hope and promise that was lost to hatred and murder.” I would certainly agree that she has become the overriding symbol of the Holocaust…”Talking about her story, our story would later become a thread that bound me to her and kept our friendship alive long after she was gone.” So tell us a short version of your mother's story, from her birth in Berlin to the Netherlands, how she met Anne Frank and their last meeting in Bergen-Belsen.   My mother was born in 1928 in Berlin. She had a lovely childhood. And her father was a very high official in the German Otto Braun government. In 1933, when Hitler came into power, her father understood immediately that he cannot stay anymore in Germany because he also wrote against Hitler, and he went to England. So, we didn't go and stay in England, and he went to Holland. And my mother had to go to school. And so on the first day they would go to the grocery. Her mother sees another woman that comes from Germany. Of course they started to talk and they came fro